29 things to look for when choosing a Cloud Service Provider

This is an adapted extract from the complete whitepaper developed in partnership with Frost and Sullivan. You can download the full report for free here.

In our latest whitepaper developed by Frost and Sullivan, there’s some good advice for anyone who is in the market for a cloud service provider.

Frost and Sullivan outlined three main areas that are essential to consider when evaluating an appropriate vendor: Security & Privacy, Availability and Performance. The relative importance of each criterion differs for each organisation or application, but they are three categories that you should be aware of:

Security & Privacy

Concerns around security and privacy related to access, storage, and retrieval of data have been the major roadblocks in cloud adoption.

Customers will need to ensure that the cloud service provider has its data centre secured as per the ISO 27001 standard and also to ensure its security policies and standards directly maps to ISO 27002 controls.

Availability

Customers hosting their sites over a public cloud expect the highest level of availability, as any downtime will affect its reputation and business.

For most mission critical systems, customers will certainly expect very high availability, often as high as 99.999%

Performance

The cloud computing landscape is maturing and businesses are expecting high performance environments from cloud providers.

It is essential for the end users to have the same user experience from the cloud as they will be benchmarking the performance of workloads hosted in their own data centres.

Want more detail? Here’s a list of 29 specific things you should be looking for when choosing the best cloud service provider for your organisation:

Technology and Business checklist for choosing a Cloud Service Provider

Please use this checklist next time you’re in the market for a Cloud Service Provider, and share it with friends and colleagues.

If you’d like to speak to a member of our sales team about our services then get in touch.